182 comments:

I'm assuming you mean all the scatological stuff. It was pretty juvenile, but not really worth censoring. I'm not sure where the line is between a juvenile joke gone too far and spam. I was wondering how long that poster would keep it going if people just kind of ignored it.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It seems like that was censored for no other reason than that some people found it annoying. (It wasn't racist, or defamatory, or anything). And that's a terrible principle.

947 here. Frankly, I found the poop jokes less annoying than some of the complaining about the job market, which is itself pretty repetitive and some of which borders on sexist. I agree, upon reflection, that censoring the jokes for no other reason than that some people found them annoying is a terrible idea.

Both of these posters seem like the femtroll, who was also the scat poster (note how the posts all included "FEHMUNISM!" or something like that). The most fascinating thing about internet people like this is how transparent they are and how little they seem to realize it.

Agreed. 9:47/9:57 is a particularly blithering idiot. People are here dealing with the fact that, after all the time and toil and money they've sunk into their education, they will be chronically poor and unable to get secure work in the field. Meanwhile, they argue, others are getting great positions on the basis of sex discrimination (anti male, in this case).

If you think those claims are false, refute them. If you think they're true but the sexism is justified, then justify it. But to come into the one safe space for people who've been going through the wringer and whose lives have been derailed, just because toy want to tell them their sincere stories are tiresome to you, well, that's sickening behavior and I hope others with a little basic consideration find work before you do.

PS I'm not the poster in questions, and I have a great job, so I have no dog in this race. I just find your callous attitude morally repellent.

10:22, no one who can get a PhD in philosophy needs to be chronically poor. Sure, we might not get jobs teaching philosophy, but there are plenty of jobs out there for people of above average intelligence.

If someone wants to teach philosophy so much that he decides to be a poor adjunct for life, that's his call. Maybe it's unfortunate that he doesn't get to fulfill his dream of a tenure track job, but that's how life goes. Not everybody gets a dream job. That's not injustice, that's life.

I'm 9:53 (not 9:47/57) and I think it is pretty obnoxious of both 10:02 and 10:22 to try and make out like I am trolling for merely expressing an opinion about what kind of principles justify censorship, and seemingly dismissing it merely on the basis that someone who appears to hold the same view on this issue also has other opinions that you dislike. That's bullshit, and you know it.

Also, 10:22, while I have sympathy for people who are having a rough time on the job market, this is emphatically NOT a safe space. Nor is it the 'one place' where people can do anything. If you want a 'safe space' where people can tell their stories without hearing from people whose attitudes they find callous, then you are welcome to set up a moderated site. That is what the people behind 'What it's Like' presumably had to do in order to get their safe space. There is nothing stopping you doing the same.

10:02 refers to 'both' these posters (so, referring to more than one individual poster). At that point, there were clearly two posters: 9:47/57, and me. So it seems pretty clear that that comment was directed at me. I don't know how else you would interpret 'both' posters.

I'm 947/957 and not 953/1036/1101. And not the femtroll, though that allegation is kinda funny. 1022 might have me right: I might be a particularly blithering idiot. Oh well, c'est la vie, and all that. FWIW, 1022, I made no claims about whether the job market is unfair to men or whether that would be justified. It is perfectly possible to find complaining more annoying than poop jokes, even while granting some of the substance of the complaints.

Further support for the claim that the poster formerly known as femtroll is also the scat troll: the level and tone of discussion this weekend was generally pretty good. Most tellingly, there seemed to be no clear cases of willful and egregious misreading and misrepresentation of others' views in argument. At least nothing on the level of what one sees when that person is around.

Here's a half-baked theory. I wonder if it might explain some of what's going on. Perhaps someone can disabuse me of it quickly if it's a non-starter. I'm not particularly attached to it. It has blissfully little to do with gender as far as I can tell.

Here's the idea: it used to be that where one was likely to be interviewed/hired was a function largely of pedigree. Then more recently, it's become pedigree and publications. Ever worried about flight risk, cultural/institutional fit, etc., hiring departments tended to give interviews/offers to people they thought were in the ballpark of those likely to accept, fit in, and stay.

Then two things happened: people started carpet-bombing journals like never before (with some success), and there was an economic crash. As a result, people with a good but not elite dossier in 2015 are hoping for jobs that someone with the same dossier in 2005 (2000? 1995?) might have turned their nose up at. The real trouble is, the people doing the hiring now were on the market in 2005 (etc.), and they haven't updated their sense of who's likely to accept, fit in, and stay. (Which is not to criticize them; no one knows about or understands all the variables in a market.) As a result, lots of impressive people are being passed over in favor of people with "less impressive" dossiers. Naturally this is upsetting, and makes some vivid explanations about deliberate unfairness seem appealing. But all that's really going on is a big market failure.

Yep. And not that I think anyone in particular here has nefarious intentions, but if you did want to distract from the real issues, getting the peasants to fight, blame, and hate each other over who gets which scraps of the pie is a great way to distract them from the fact that the more important problem is that someone else stole the pie and left them with only scraps in the first place.

Correction: I should not have written "all that's really going on" at the end. That is improperly dismissive of other partial explanations, and I meant only to be offering market failure as a partial explanation, anyway.

6:58, I assumed for purposes of my comment that hiring departments prefer to hire the most talented candidate that is likely to accept and stay in the position. They end up not hiring that candidate. Thus the offers being made are inefficient, by both Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks standards.

Perhaps you'd like to explain what the supposed mistake is instead of being snarky without risking saying something false yourself.

Hiring committees exhibit certain observable patterns in their hiring choices in recent years, as indicated in CDJ's dataset for 2012 and 2013.

Of those they hired into TT/post-doc from no prior post, a majority (54%) of women have 0 publications, as opposed to 40% for men. The average publication rate for women is around half that of men (0.8 versus 1.5). For the higher quality publications, the gap is higher: men publish on average at three times the rate women do (0.42 to 0.14). Again, the greatest disparity is higher prestige women (with, on average, 0.6 pubs) versus lower prestige men (on average 1.7 pubs). Lower prestige men have to work about three times as hard as higher prestige women do, to reach the same position.

This has nothing to do with the "job market". This is simply the NC ideology working in practice. According to NC: upper class women deserve preferential treatment. This is because the upper-class women are delicate little flowers, oppressed "victims", who suffer colossal oppression -- comparable to Laura Kipnis's great aunt, who survived a death camp.

So on your view, it is really men who have completed graduate school in philosophy but have had to publish a bit more than their female counterparts to get a job who are the real victims who suffer colossal oppression - comparable to Laura Kipnis's great aunt, who survived a death camp.

I don't know what your goal is here, but it seems pretty obvious that you are trolling. That comparison is not the relevant comparison, which I am sure you know. You also routinely describe women from top programs us upper class, when you know nothing about their socio-economic backgrounds. It seems pretty clear that you are doing this in order to try and tap into the fact that people are often more hostile to those they perceive as 'upper-class.' Your hyperbolic description of the NC 'ideology' is an absurd straw man, and the reference to the death camps is really beyond the pale here.

This issue has already been discussed very recently in lots of detail. I hope no-one else bothers to respond to your post, as it is clear that you do not wish to contribute to reasonable discussions on this issue, but are instead merely attempting to provoke people. You're doing a really big disservice to people who actually care about this issue.

I'm not at all impressed with the fact that a person has 1 or 100 publications till I read some of them myself. So I'm not particularly impressed by the argument that says that men on average have x number of publications while women on average have some lower number y. The number really means almost nothing to me. Even in the case of highly esteemed philosophers recognized for the quality of their work I sometimes see them publish two almost identical articles under different names, etc. Really, going on and on about the numbers is not on the mark.

Yeah...even if one grants that number of articles published is an unreliable proxy for talent (and it is), it's obviously a criterion that a lot of committee members use, at least for initial cuts. Does anyone really think that committee members generally even read every applicant's writing sample when they get 150 (let alone 500) dossiers? I've heard tales of committees who supposedly try to do that, but those tales are also generally followed by "can you believe they're actually doing that?"

7:13, arguing with the new crop of "feminists" is like trying to arguing with creationists or climate change deniers. No amount of objective evidence can affect their beliefs. Their beliefs have been decided in advance. It's a religion.

I'm 10:05 and not identical with earlier commenters on the thread, so I don't know why you're some confident about what my conclusion is on the bigger question, 7:13. I was just commenting on what I find valuable, not really entering in to the big battle between the angry white guys and the NC feminists that you or someone in this part of June is raging about. What I find valuable is to trust my own judgment (and those of relevant experts) on whether someone's work is good rather than to be impressed by numbers.

"What I find valuable is to trust my own judgment (and those of relevant experts) on whether someone's work is good rather than to be impressed by numbers." Right on. Now, if only papers were generally selected for publication based on the judgment of relevant experts.

This is so much dodging, the "are the publications good" stuff. The fact is that we know they're used as a measure of candidate quality by search committees and we know women don't need them as much as men do. How many ridiculous kinds of evidence are people willing to entertain for the proposition that philosophy has an anti-female bias?

So 10:05 just stopped by to bless us with the insight that quantity of publications is not a perfect guide to the quality of the work. Instead, he reveals, we should trust our own opinion after reviewing the work and that of relevant experts. I am really glad you put these insights down in writing. Perhaps you can link to them in the next comment section at LR.

What is the publication disparity at time of hire between higher prestige males (i.e. top five or so programs) and run of the mill males?

Also, why should we think that rates of journal publication (especially at such an early stage of development) tracks philosophical promise or ability on a straightforward way? That's the kind of thing that deans argue.

Can anyone come up with a reason why no-one ever refers to 'upper-class men' and 'lower-class men' in these discussions (hose would be the appropriate analog of 'upper-class women', no? ) other than that they are deliberately trying to poison the well?

I suggest that upper-class women calling themselves "survivors" is a fucking obscenity. Real human beings did survive Nazi camps - e.g., Laura Kipnis's great aunt - and many didn't. Kipnis's point is clear: how about entitled and privileged women cut out this manipulative and offensive bullshit?

"Survivor" is a term used to describe rape and domestic violence victims. Rape and domestic violence are violent crimes, which one can survive. "Upper-class" women can survive these crimes as well. Upper class women can also be "burn survivors," "car crash survivors," "airplane crash survivors," "9/11 survivors," "survivor of near drowning," "cancer survivor," and so on. "Survivor" is generally not a word solely associated with Holocaust and other mass atrocity victims.

By the way, what's up with the implication that "upper class women" aren't "real human beings"? Also, you realize plenty of "upper class women" were victims of the Holocaust too, right? Like, being a wealthy woman doesn't magically grant you a shield of invulnerability to any and all bad things in the world?

As someone who actually is a victim of violent assault, I find your comments, 7:08, fucking disgusting. There are real victims of violent assault. The victims of violent assault are not the same as upper-class women who make up stuff to present themselves as "victims".

7:08, I'm hoping if we all stay quiet, 7:01 (etc) will just go away. There's no point engaging. (Though it is kind of amusing that he just can't seem to stop himself from committing a fallacy every time he opens his mouth. This has got to be deliberate, right?)

Bullshit. I am a victim of violent assault. I don't describe myself as a "survivor". This would be manipulative dishonesty, in much the same way as Kipnis noted, referring to her great aunt who survived a death camp. Kipnis was right. This is lying manipulative bullshit.

So, you upper-class liars: take your manipulative bullshit and leave. You're a disgrace to civilised society.

This isn't about Holocaust survivors or rape victims. This is about rampant job discrimination, which anyone with two eyes can plainly see. People have even supplied quantitative numbers and studies to satisfy those of you who fetishize that sort of evidence.

The evidence--anecdotal, observational, and quantitative--is in. Those of us who have the intellectual and moral integrity to admit that the state of affairs are what they are would like those who have brought this state of affairs about--or implicitly condone it--to give us reasons why it is okay.

Re: sexual assault, you're right that men are victimized at similar rates to women, but that doesn't mean that women are offenders at similar rates to men. In fact, they probably aren't. The DV statistics are right on, though.

8:25, I think you may have misunderstood what I was referring to when I alluded to the "objective data." I was drawing attention to apparent gender discrimination in job hiring, not domestic violence or anything of that sort.

What is one word that you refuse to use in your philosophising because you believe it obscures more than it helps the discussion on an open set/family of topics and is astonished by the amount of ink continually poured over it?

11:25 again. Just by way of clarification: I have in mind, as an instance, van Inwagen's fr** w*ll proposal, where he attempts to reorient discussion on what he thinks (and intended in the past) is the philosophical locus of the problem without resort to using those specific words. Tangentially, I don't know to what extent he succeeds, however -- owing to the two primitive concepts in the new formulation: '(in)determinism' and the ambiguity in modality of the 'ability' to act.

Oh, I have a whole list of phrases I go to great effort to avoid using -- not always successfully, I'm afraid -- in a non-shamefaced way. (Note that not all of these consist in a single word. Note further that I don't care.)

'reason' (in all its normative and non-normative senses)'ground' (in all its normative and non-normative senses)'ontological commitment''metaphysical/ontological dependence/determination''supervenience'

I didn't think creepy, just annoying. If you're actually hoping to read a decent discussion, having the first comment be (to paraphrase)"oh, if you think this on this issue you must also be on a particular side of all these other controversial issues" and "if you think this on this issue you must be engaged in post-hoc rationalization" gets things off to a pretty bad start.

And kind of ironic that it finishes with "is there still any room left for actual philosophy"? If you want to make room for actual philosophy, then it's usually a good idea not to start off by assuming that your interlocutors hold a whole bunch of views on other controversial issues and dismissing them as merely post-hoc rationalizers on this issue because of it.

Maybe you have a narrower conception of who is in which camp, but if you read the discussion, there were a lot of commenters who didn't think the numbers themselves showed a problem.See, for example, 2, 5 and 13 (as well as Cheshire Calhoun). The prediction was that people would try to rationalize 'this' - the numbers (implying that the rationalization would be post hoc).There were lots of good rationalizations that were not post hoc.

That aside, my main point still stands - it is a terrible way to start off a discussion about something by making those kinds of assumptions about anybody who may disagree with you about what a certain piece of evidence shows or the extent to which we should be worried about it.

Ceteris paribus, a *candidate* with more publications is a stronger candidate than a *candidate* with fewer. But, also, ceteris paribus, a *hired candidate* with fewer publications is a stronger candidate than a *hired candidate8 with more. The point is illustrated by thinking about school prestige. Take all students coming from NYU that get tenure track jobs. They will have, on average, fewer publications than the average student out of Northeast Kentucky State who gets a tenure track job. An NYU student with zero publications might still get a job at Rutgers, or Pitt, or Northeast Kentucky State, whereas a Northeast Kentucky State student with zero publications has no chance at a job at all--in order to get a job, they need 7 publications (or whatever). This is not bias, at least if bias is supposed to be irrational or unfair. It's the product of a well-functioning job market. NYU students won't invest their time in writing papers (or as many papers), because they don't have to, because on average they are better students and have other credentials to prove it. But most Northeast Kentucky State students aren't that good. If you're one who is good, if you're the exception, you better prove it--you better publish. And you better publish a lot. CDJ's evidence backs this up--what others call "prestige bias," I call "prestige fairness." If the average number of publications by a Northeast Kentucky State student who landed a tenure track job was equal to the average number by an NYU student, it would show the market was out of whack.

It's straightforward, easy to tell a similar story when it comes to gender. So, a challenge to people on this blog: explain why the prestige bias about schools that CDJ's evidence shows is fair, rational (as it clearly is--if you deny that it is, you've got a reductio on your hands) but that the gender bias it shows is not.

The straightforward story is that if philosophy treats women poorly, it's likely to drive out disproportionately more women of lesser ability before they hit the job market--they are the ones less likely to stick with it despite the obstacles.

What we need to explain is why, of the cohort of people who are good enough to complete grad school, men are more likely to have published than women. One possible explanation is that of that cohort, the women are on average less talented. But we have no reason to think this is true. One explanation is that the women are inherently lazier. But we have no reason to think this is true. I think the best explanation is probably that getting a publication in philosophy requires a certain level of confidence in your own work (and your own opinion of that work). You have to be confident enough to think that your work is worth reading, and worth taking up the time of editors and reviewers; and you have to be confident enough in your own work to think that, when you do get the inevitable rejections, that a lot of those people (who are anonymous, but are likely more senior than you) are wrong about their evaluations. There is lots of evidence that men are more confident in their abilities than women. See for example this article http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-confidence-gap/359815/. In particular, this:

"To show the real-world impact of self-perception, the students were then invited—having no knowledge of how they’d performed [in a previously administered test]—to participate in a science competition for prizes. The women were much more likely to turn down the opportunity: only 49 percent of them signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men. “That was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities,” Ehrlinger told us. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.”"

One problem is that trying to fix this - say, taking active steps to encourage women to publish more - risks exacerbating another problem we have in the discipline, which is that most journals are massively swamped (most people think it would be better if there were less pressure to publish more and early, rather than more pressure).

Of course it would be really difficult to work out how to enforce this, but I think we'd be much better off across the board if we took steps to de-emphasize publishing. The problem is now that junior people are stuck in an arms race which ends up making everyone worse off in the long run. But these things are very hard to fix.

The proportion of women is pretty stable from degree completion and through grad school (around 30% -- these facts are not in dispute). The CDJ data seems to also show there is no drop attributable to the market either.

You could try to argue that philosophy treats women poorly in freshman classes just before students decide what to major in. This is when the greatest drop-off occurs. But surveys indicate no climate problems or other signs of differential treatment in freshman classrooms.

Not only that, but in universities that don't require any non-philosophy students to take philosophy, we get the same relatively low numbers of female students *even registering for freshman courses*.

What remarkably effective sexual harassers philosophers must be. They not only drive away the female students who attend their lectures, but even those who have not yet set foot on campus and are registering for freshman courses over the summer after finishing high school.

To defeat sexual harassing supervillains like that, we need to give feminists unlimited powers. Forget justice as you understand it. It gets in the way of the femphils doing their noble work fighting evil.

"What we need to explain is why, of the cohort of people who are good enough to complete grad school, men are more likely to have published than women"

One explanation you don't mention is differential incentives that arise from the CDJ date. Why did I publish in graduate school? At least one reason is that I realized that if I didn't, I would thereby massively reduce my chances of getting a job. If I was a woman, the calculation in favor of publishing would not look so attractive. (And this information is salient: at least where I'm from, everyone, whatever their gender, realizes that men and women are not treated the same on the market.)

I'm worried that all this focus on the percentages rather than the absolute numbers is exaggerating the extent of the difference. If you look at the actual numbers from that date. 268 people got jobs, 185 men and 83 women. If 40% of those men had 0 pubs, that is 74 people. If 54% of those women had 0 pubs, that is 45 people.

But if just 8 of those jobs had gone to men with 0 pubs rather than women with 0 pubs, the percentage of men and women who got jobs with 0 pubs would have been pretty much the same (by my back of the envelope calculations, in both cases the percentage would then by about 45%). And so the percentage of men and women who got jobs with >1 pub would be about the same.

Should we really be so worried, if it is true that if things had been different in just 8 cases out of 268, there wouldn't be much difference to worry over at all? (You might still be worried over the differences between 2 and 1 pub, I guess, but I think the further we go with this, the less it matters. It might be true that someone with 2 pubs looks a lot better than someone with 0, but it doesn't seem to me that someone with 8 pubs looks a lot better than someone with 6, venues being relatively equal).

Ok, 12:36, but what if 8 more of those jobs had gone to women without pubs instead of men without pubs? One can always mess with numbers and ask what they'd look like if we just discarded some set of cases.

More in the spirit of your comment, one shouldn't draw strong conclusions from a single year given that the sample size is not huge. Does this trend hold from year to year? I honestly don't know. I haven't followed things that closely.

It's not 'messing with numbers' or saying we should 'discard cases' to point out that the percentage difference might be misleading if the absolute numbers are in fact quite small. This is a pretty well-recognized problem.

But yes, I do think that people are drawing far too strong a conclusion from a single year with a pretty small sample size. Most importantly, people keep talking about the percentage of women who got hired who had X number of publications - but the number of women who got hired in total is pretty small (less than 100).

I'm on vacation now and don't have access to my office computer. Otherwise, I might be able to find that citation for you. But basically, you just have to look at the proportions of female students in freshman courses, both in schools where philosophy is not required fit anyone an in schools where it is either a general requirement, or one of two or three jointly necessary requirements, or else required for one or more popular majors like business or psychology. Where this is the case, you get a significant downward slope in female enrollment after that introductory course. The reasons behind women not choosing to continue on philosophy are explored to some extent in interviews done in the famous 2012 article in Hypatia. Interestingly, one thing we now know for sure is that women are not choosing to stay away from philosophy because it's combative (that was previously a popular feminist theory). The main reason is likely that these women were not very interested in taking a bunch of Philosophy courses to start with, and taking the required elective didn't change their plans.

When you look at schools where there's no extrinsic reason for women to take philosophy, there isn't the big drop off after the freshman year. You just don't see large numbers of women in intro courses to start with. My personal guess is that the socialization of girls is a major factor here. But a major finding, and I think this was in the Hypatia study, is that female university students trends to be much more concerned than their male counterparts in his useful each course will be in preparing them for careers. Philosophy instructors tend to be bad at getting a sense of those benefits across.

When you combine the stats from the schools where intro philosophy is required with those where it isn't, you get the big post freshman slide. But that just seems to be an aggregate effect.

If anyone has access to that differentiated survey, or remembers where it comes from, please post a link. Otherwise, you might have to do some digging, 12:53. But I do remember seeing the same thing.

Well, if it turns out that every year the percentage is roughly the same, then it doesn't really matter that in any one year the absolute numbers are small. So it kinda is messing with the numbers. The better statement of your worry is small sample size, not absolute difference.

Isn;t it both? Because if we only had one year, but in that year there was a much bigger difference, the people arguing that it matters would have a much better case.

Also, I wouldn't call it 'suppressing' I had a look at that post, and they were not releasing publicly a whole bunch of things, but gave pretty clear instructions on how to go about accessing it.

I for one would not participate in a study that released gender info, because of the fact that people have repeatedly used this really irresponsibly. I'm talking about the cases I have seen here where anonymous people have mentioned specific women by name and publicly dissed their record, publications etc.

People have also used this info to speculate about whether 'junior women publishing' in a specific journal - so, not actually mentioning specific women, but describing a small set of specific women that anyone could easily find out about - as having got their publications due to pro-women bias.

If the 'public' is likely to handle the info you release in this way - using it as an excuse to smear the reputation of specific people in the profession - then you've got reason to think you should protect the people you're studying.

The list of commenters at DN re: the same-sex marriage decision is pretty lame. It's a bunch of people who say the things you'd expect to hear at DN, followed by a video of one of the flag bearers trotting out a bunch of straw men arguments. Would have been nice to see some critical work instead of more of the same. (And his comment: "well, you can't tell who was invited to participate by who does participate" is lame, too. Obviously he could find some critical voices if he tried very hard. Or at all.)

JW also said this in the original article -- "To get clearer on some of these issues, I asked several philosophers to contribute some brief remarks on the ruling. They are..." -- which at least strongly suggests that there weren't a bunch of invited (and dissenting) philosophers who declined to participate.

But I see the bind he's in. If JW published a note from a well-known Catholic philosopher, say, who espoused the standard Catholic views on these matters, he'd get all sorts of grief for providing a "forum for hatred". Can you imagine the field day NC party-liners would have if that kind of intellectual diversity got voiced at a leading professional blog?

That's a bit misleading. He was directly asked why he did not ask any proponents of natural marriage to contribute to the piece. Surely it's OK to respond truthfully to a question like that.

Also, I think it is a bit misleading to say that the 'jump' is precisely what the GCC is all about. The link we've been given is not even from FP. And futhermore, there is disagreement on that thread about whether asking how many people of a certain gender were invited is a good question. So I think it is a mistake to simply pick the view that best suits your point and claim that that view is representative of some group.

I was responding to the view that the GCC cares about the reasons for all-male lineups. It doesn't. If you invite 100 women and 5 men, and all 5 men accept and all 100 women decline, you end up a target of the GCC.

A lot of our current problems seem to stem from what is effectively the takeover of the APA by feminist activists. (Seriously, look at the composition of the committees if you don't believe me). This is the usual pattern: those who are fanatical enough about their cause to do the dreary work of committees and professional politics end up with a disproportionate amount of the power.

Maybe we need some metabros to nominate themselves for APA committees:

"All due respect, but your repeated insistence that you're presenting cogent arguments that we're misconstruing is wearing pretty thin at this point... Lay out your premises clearly and tell us what your conclusion actually is, and we'll see who gets it wrong then. We're trying our best here."

I'm surprised that Leiter didn't put a stop sooner to yet another of Arvan's attempts at self-promotion. Did he really think that his obscure small point journal article was the key to evaluating the issue that Tooley raised?

Funnily enough, it doesn't seem like the problem is with Arvan's argument in his article, just with his squeamish unwillingness to actually specify any of the empirical data that that argument ought to process in order to become relevant to the discussion at hand. So much for the gritty engagement of non-ideal justice-studies...

Agreed, 1:48. Arvan is usually a fairly intelligent and thoughtful person. But like so many others, he suffers from having been informed by the unhealthy environment of the NC echo chamber on these issues. If frank and open discussions of these complex issues of gender and social justice were common and not dominated by ideology, my guess is that Arvan would not have had the unshakable intuition that he was on the right side of this one and would have thought it through more carefully, following the logic where it led.

What the fuck do these people think the meta metablog is about? How do they think it came about? Idiots. If you don't want to hear antifeminist views, avoid this philosophy blog and go to, well, any of the thousand feminist ones.

When Glaucon and I set up the metablog as an unmoderated philosophy blog, it was not so that people could waltz onto a third iteration of it and talk about anything other than the feminist conspiracy, willy nilly, without a care in the world, etc.

1:44, you are definitely an idiot. But I can see you're very happy with yourself. If only you could see how cringeworthy your stupid attempt at satire looks from the position of intelligent and informed readers. But you'll never get it, and you will keep embarrassing yourself, and I guess we'll have to tolerate it like we tolerated the scatfem.

1:59, it's interesting that you would call someone an idiot when you are likely one of those white males that cannot get a tenure track job because of all 'anti-white male bias.' When did philosophy become the playground for whiners?

Speak for yourself, 1:59. Really - I don't know why people think that saying things like 'this is how you look from the perspective of intelligent people' and 'we'll have to tolerate' helps. It just makes you look like someone who is obviously pulling a cheap trick to try and sound more authoritative.

For my part, I way prefer 1:44, and the pooper to idiots like 1:59, and the people who keep calling everyone 'femtroll' or attaching 'fem' to everything or assuming that if anyone does anything they don't like than that person must be a. a woman and b. a feminist.

So hear hear, 1:44. The metablog is not 'about' anything. If people like 7:04 don't want to hear from people who they find annoying they can go and set up their own moderated anti-feminist blog. I am sure it will be a roaring success, just like the last one.

Idiot at 2:22, I can tell you that the odds are exactly 0% that I'm a white male without tenure.

Idiot at 3:39, you've got it exactly backwards. I'm not complaining that feminists are posting here. Far from it. The issue that came up before, and that started this discussion in a previous incarnation, is that the 2:22 idiot and his or her stupid friends showed up and complained about anti feminist posts, the tone, the term 'Femtroll', etc. But the whole point of this blog is to have a free discussion about these things without pressuring people to confirm to the feminist party line like everywhere else. So if you don't like people posting antifeminist stuff, or if the term 'Femtroll' bothers you, you should leave. And it's not because we don't want you to have a voice here. It's because you don't want us to have a voice here. Major difference.

3:55 is one of those people, I bet, that keeps insisting that he really is sincerely interested in free and open discussions, and wants people to have a voice, but thinks that starting every post by insulting people who disagree with him is a great way to do that. Funny how calling everyone an 'idiot' and 'femtroll' doesn't count as evidence that 3:55 doesn't want feminists to have a voice here, but people complaining about that counts as evidence that the people complaining don't want people like 3:55 to have a voice here. So 3:55 is allowed to insult and make fun of people as much as he likes, and no-one can complain because free speech!

I'm happy for feminists to post here. I'm not altogether happy with idiots, tone policers and trolls posting here. If you or the other idiot posted an argument that I thought was faulty, I'd explain why.

But calling you an idiot and the feminist troll the Femtroll is not meant to derail a conversation. You've already made clear that you don't want an intelligent conversation, and I don't waste my time arguing with idiots or trolls. It was already a foregone conclusion that there was to be no intelligent discussion. Your idiotic posts determined that. So did the other(?) idiot's inept attempt at satire.

If you don't want to be called an idiot or a troll, stop being those things.

Never, ever talk down to people smarter than you and expect but to be spanked.

Go ahead and say I insulted you.I make no bones about it.

Now let's give it a rest. When you come back, cut the stupid metablog founder bullshit we've already debunked so many times. It's not funny. It was stupid the first time, and it's much more stupid the twentieth time. Raise an argument, not snark. Listen and understand what your interlocutors are saying. And you'll see, you won't be called an idiot or a troll.

This is just getting funnier and funnier. 4:36, you're not actually responding to anything that anyone has said to you. Your position is completely inconsistent. And just stating things like you think that you are 'smarter' than the people you are talking to, saying 'we've' debunked things, and telling people to 'raise an argument, not snark'' when the vast majority of your posts are insults and snark does not help you.

Femtroll, you're only fooling or amusing yourself. We all see through your pathetic disguise. Leave us be. Please. Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish. Then find it by being a troll somewhere else. We've had our turn. Go haunt the nudechaps. I'm sure they'd at least appreciate having a commenter for once.

I didn't think creepy, just annoying. If you're actually hoping to read a decent discussion, having the first comment be (to paraphrase)"oh, if you think this on this issue you must also be on a particular side of all these other controversial issues" and "if you think this on this issue you must be engaged in post-hoc rationalization" gets things off to a pretty bad start.

And kind of ironic that it finishes with "is there still any room left for actual philosophy"? If you want to make room for actual philosophy, then it's usually a good idea not to start off by assuming that your interlocutors hold a whole bunch of views on other controversial issues and dismissing them as merely post-hoc rationalizers on this issue because of it.

D. I was watching TV and someone on TV said, "you look pretty tonight," to another person on TV, so it was in my head, and I guess I thought it would be funny to post it here since I obviously had no idea how pretty any of you look tonight.

I don't have any aspirations 7:52. I just like goofin' around with my anonymous and disgruntled philosophy pals sometimes. I haven't been here in ages. Nice to see things haven't changed much. Home is where the heart is, amirite?

PS: I'm writing a ton of shitty [hopefully they're not too shitty] papers for everyone, so if you ever referee in any area ever, get ready. Some fodder for your aggro natures is headed your way.

And 7:52, do you appreciate how unhinged you sound? Whatever you are trying to do, it isn't working. And you have been going at this now for months. You know the old bit about the definition of insanity, right?

OP here. I'm not a feminist. Or an anti-feminist. Whatever that means. I just wish people would talk about something else. Because it's boring, and it turns into accusations of being "the femtroll", namecalling, weird internal debates about what people did or did not say 5 comments ago, whatever. I was literally away for two weeks. And I was disappointed to return to this bullshit bickering. Excuse me while I disappear for two weeks again and hope for the best.

Maybe you can see my IP 9:32. You always get me right. Good for you I guess. Thanks for finally calling me Femtroll. Although "the" is misleading as many, many others have been called that here. But OP is right about the bickering, and I don't want to get into it with you right now.

"Funny how calling everyone an 'idiot' and 'femtroll' doesn't count as evidence that 3:55 doesn't want feminists to have a voice here" This is a perfect example of what is wrong with feminists. They think they haven't got a voice unless everyone shuts up, listens to them, and doesn't criticise them, take the piss out of them, call them idiots etc. Well, feminist fools, you, and women, in general, have always had a voice, and having a voice does not mean anyone has to listen to you or be polite to you. And if you can't cope with that, then you're not equal.

So let's say there is in fact a pro-female bias at the final stage of the job market. So what? I doubt any of you would have been complaining this vehemently about the pro-male bias that had been in place for decades prior (and which is still in place at many stages of the process). I suspect the only reason for the outrage is that, for once in your life, you aren't the one the biases are in favor of.

So let's say there was in fact a pro-male bias at the final stage of the job market. So what? I doubt any of you are complaining this vehemently about the pro-female bias that is currently in place, and may well be in place in the future. I suspect the only reason for the past outrage is that you weren't the one the biases were in favor of.

How about this, 12:43 - The pro-male bias is statistical and difficult to detect without recourse to tendentious social science theories. Nevertheless, it is the target of probably thousands of articles, conferences, campaigns, magazine and newspaper articles, blog posts, speeches, APA initiatives, and so on. The pro-female bias is overt and easy to detect in hiring numbers. Nevertheless, it is denied by people in power in the discipline, and data is intentionally left uncollected which could easily shed light on it.

The tu quoque fallacy is the fallacy of ignoring an argument that your practices or beliefs are faulty on the grounds that the party raising the argument has the same or similar faults. It's a fallacy of irrelevance: the issue of your argument or practices being faulty is, in these cases, independent of the issue of the speakers arguments or practices being faulty.

That can't even apply here. The original charge is that there's a Puerto male bias. If it turns out, as is being claimed, that there's also a pro female bias elsewhere and that this bias is at least roughly as strong, then it seems not to be the case that there's an overall male bias.

Also, if the parties who go nuts publicizing and taking action over the localized pro male biases ignore the localized pro female biases, then the net result is that the social pressure and general beliefs about the big picture will be distorted.

So there's no spectre of irrelevance here, and no case for a tu quoque.

No, it isn't. You have statistics from one year. With a very small difference in absolute terms. However, what we do have much better evidence for in terms of hiring numbers (because we have evidence from a number of years) is that men and women are hired pretty much in proportion to their numbers in the discipline.

Count me in. I really enjoy the conversations here that extend beyond gender politics in philosophy. People can sometimes say the most interesting things when they're anonymous and moderators aren't looking over their shoulder. I want to read those things.

There are some very good top-level comments here sometimes that don't produce much (or sometimes any) discussion. I think it's often because they're just sensible and nobody has a bone to pick with anything the author said (which is why most philosophers usually talk). That doesn't mean the post wasn't interesting and worthwhile to other people, but unfortunately it doesn't feel that way when you're hoping to get people talking.

12:26, people here are critically discussing the influence of the so-called 'feminist' direction taken by our professional organization, many departments, and of course all the mainstream philosophy blogs. I know many other contributors personally. We are not all male, by far. we have many different positions on philosophical and political issues, and most importantly, all the contributors I know are tenured.

To claim that these discussions, with sustained and objective arguments about justice and social psychology are men complaining "how women are taking their jobs" is ignorant to the point of being ridiculous.

That is on a par with describing an APA session on skepticism or materialism as atheists talking about how their the Bible demands to much of them, or describing a conference on egalitarianism as a bunch of lazy junkies complaining that the taxpayers won't give them money for drugs.

If that's you reading and thinking at your highest level, this isn't such a great blog for you.

The reason this blog exists, and the reason there are so many critical discussions about pseudofeminism here, is that we couldn't critically discuss these things anywhere else without unfair moderation, and they're important trends in the profession. If you want other discussions, great. There are hundreds of Philosophy blogs for you to visit on every topic. This is the only one where we get to discuss this stuff without censorship, tone policing or moderation.

Maybe metablog commenters are concerned about widespread gender-based prejudice and preferential treatment in the profession? Maybe they're concerned with vilification and smear campaigns against innocent people? Maybe they're concerned with the distribution of false allegations? Maybe they're concerned with witch hunts, ruining people's lives? Maybe metablog commenters have moral objections to the kind of people prepared to use institutional mechanisms, outside the proper oversight of the law, to destroy the lives of their colleagues, to achieve self-interested political aims?

not sure why some people think one can do simply anything after tenure. we continue to be annually reviewed after tenure and can still lose our job if we aren't performing to standard (we get two chances).

It's not that I think people can do *anything* after tenure. But I do think people with tenure can afford to spend less time and energy worrying about getting more publications. And it would be nice if more of them seemed like they were genuinely interested in what the students and junior people in their departments were up to.

8.38 great remark except for (yet again, I think) your attempt to introduce an entirely bogus distinction between real feminism and pseudofeminism. There is no such distinction. Feminism is female supremacism and always has been. The idea the femism is really about equality, or that women are people too, is just the camoflage to the useful idiots.